Several January 6 Patriots clinched early release amid the ongoing Supreme Court review on the legality of the federal charges filed against them.
An article in the Washington Post reports that the top court will give their opinion on how prosecutors differentiated actions by protesters and classified them as “obstructing an official proceeding” of Congress and misdemeanor offenses like shouting during a congressional hearing; however, their decision will not arrive until the summer.
The Supreme Court’s decision will influence ongoing sentences and convictions of more than 350 J6 patriots if the prosecutors are proven to misuse criminal statutes to convict demonstrators unlawfully.
Three J6 demonstrators will be released early, including a Delaware man who carried a Confederate flag inside the Capitol and was given leniency, reducing his 3-year sentence to one year; an Ohio man who broke the police line and joined the first few demonstrators who entered the building was freed six months from a 19-month imprisonment; and another one was imprisoned for hanging a Trump flag after serving his sentence for five months.
The law on obstruction charges, which the prosecutors used against the three men, was passed to limit accounting corruption amid the collapse of Enron in 2001. However, prosecutors utilized the law to charge the protesters instead of sedition or insurrection.
The use of the obstruction charges was earlier upheld; however, two justices countered that the law was only applicable to tampering or destruction of evidence.
If the highest court ruled that the obstruction charge did not apply to the protesters, this could influence the election interference charges against Donald Trump.
Thomas F. Hogan, a retired US district judge who passed a sentence against 26 demonstrators, warned law school students at Georgetown that if the Supreme Court decides to overturn the decision, it “would have a devastating effect on the prosecution side.”
Early last month, a federal appeals court decided that the January 6 defendants had their sentences improperly lengthened.
With this, district court judges in Washington, DC, will be recalculating the verdict on more than 100 people illegally convicted of felony for their alleged role in the 2021 J6 protest.
The Justice Department argues that enhancements to the verdict of the J6 demonstrators should be applied, as the counting of electoral votes they alleged could be considered a court proceeding.
The department will determine whether it will send an appeal to the full 11-member bench of the appeals court or the Supreme Court.
